Bash

How to spell bash

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bash

What does bash mean?

1. verbTo hit something or someone very hard, often causing damage.
2. nounA heavy blow or violent knock.
3. nounA lively party or celebration.

Bash in a sentence

• verb

  He tried not to bash the car door against the wall.

• noun

  The parcel arrived with a deep bash in one corner.

• noun

  They threw a huge birthday bash for their daughter.

• verb

  Workers had to bash the old plaster off the brick wall.

• noun

  One solid bash from the hammer split the log.

• noun

  The office held its annual bash at a riverside hotel.

Where does bash come from?

Language of origin: Other

Bash first appears in English around the early 1600s and is almost certainly imitative in origin, a so-called echoic word coined to sound like the heavy, smacking blow it describes. It seems to blend the sounds and senses of older words such as bang and smash, sharing their abrupt, percussive quality. Some scholars connect it to Scandinavian roots, comparing it with Old Norse and dialectal Swedish basa, meaning to strike or to flog, which fits both the sound and the sense of a forceful hit. The informal sense of a lively party, recorded much later in twentieth-century American slang, grew naturally from the idea of a boisterous, rowdy good time. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the word carries no real trap; it simply mirrors the blunt sound at its core.

How the word is built

• bash (imitative root suggesting a heavy, smashing blow); no prefix or suffix in the base form